'Every silver lining has a cloud '

As a reporter on Bradford's evening paper our political correspondent covered the city's last spasm of riots. Six years on she returns in the aftermath of the latest violence to find little has changed
Special report: race issues in the UK

In Manningham's rain-streaked streets 20-year-old Hamid sets down his ever-vibrating mobile, adjusts his baseball cap, and turns tour guide. "This is one of the three pubs that got burned down," he explains politely, pointing out the scorched and boarded Upper Globe as if it were one of Bradford's statuesque mills or the nearby Alhambra theatre. Then he points to the stumpy foundations of a flattened building and adds: "Here's the club they set on fire and then blocked the door off so no one could get out. It was not right what they did, not appropriate."

We are driving around Whetley Lane, the epicentre of the rioting that two weekends ago plunged Bradford back into the headlines and back to yet another round of recrimination, soul-searching and efforts to rebuild. Hamid, secretary of the Manningham residents' association and a Bradford lad born and bred, turns the car towards the BMW garage - torched on July 7, just as it was on a similarly hot weekend in the disturbances of 1995. Then, as now, the city's evening paper, the Telegraph & Argus, published a special "riot edition", and I was among the team of reporters detailing the damage, the explosion of blame, the cost of repairs "running into millions".

Returning six years since I left the paper and the city, the aftermath of the latest bout of violence feels different. There is, perhaps, less sheer shock (except at the viciousness of the battle with the police), but many voices - including the editorial columns of the T&A - sound wearier and more frustrated at Bradford's apparent inability to learn from disaster, its eternal capacity to bring the hammer down on its own fingers.

The sense of gloom is worsened by Lord Ouseley's report "Pride, not Prejudice", produced before the riots but published just days afterwards. The review not only condemns Bradford as a deeply divided city whose communities are segregated in home, school and workplace, but highlights its repeated failure over years to resolve the problem. Its conclusions are near identical to those presented in the Bradford Commission report produced after the 1995 disturbances, though the language pulls fewer punches: Ouseley says a "virtual apartheid exists in schools", while public authorities fail to tackle the issues.

Bruised and battered by yet another public shaming, many in Bradford feel there is greater urgency than ever to tackle the issues raised by the report and the more complex ones underlying the riot. The city cannot afford to fail - its endless quest for new investment was hardly flourishing before the BMW garage was razed a second time, and the host of new hanging baskets I see around the city centre cannot disguise the string of empty shopfronts between the Everything for £1 stores and the charity outlets. Time is running out because further decline will see more of those who can fleeing the city for the outer suburbs or further still. White flight to the greener pastures of Bingley or Ilkley has gone on for years; the less recorded signs of black flight mean the city could lose a wider cross-section of the younger generation.

The challenge facing the city is to break a cycle that has seen flurries of inquiries, reports, "visions" and recommenda tions, but precious little fundamental change. Down the years, economic decline following the mill closures has become increasingly tangled with race issues, as the mainly Pakistani ethnic community and white residents also facing unemployment and poor schooling retrenched amid mutual ignorance and suspicion.

The lack of progress only reinforces what is known as the Bradford syndrome - the phenomenon noted by JB Priestley ("local writer" to those of us at the T&A) and described by Bradford South MP Gerry Sutcliffe as "most people from Bradford talking the place down, even though everyone that comes here to study or work loves the place". It's a strange condition, betraying a sense of lost pride, an inability to hold fast to the bright nuggets that still single out Bradford among other post-industrial Northern cities: its thriving annual arts festival, its inventiveness in marketing its combination of Bronte moors, curries and Hockney gallery to tourists, its range of expertise - from the university's world renowned peace studies department to the royal infirmary's groundbreaking research into burns plastic surgery. Bradford North MP Terry Rooney, himself predicting "a period of sustained deep decline", quotes "a local saying - every silver lining has a cloud".

As a veteran of the Bradford syndrome I head for old acquaintances. None can offer an upbeat analysis. Over samosas and lassi, Bary Malik, a Pakistan-born magistrate and member of the police ethnic minorities liaison committee, pronounces himself "personally shattered - these young people didn't just ruin businesses, they ruined the reputation of my city."

He echoes a sentiment I hear countless times, from some in the white community as well as from dozens of those of Pakistani origin: the rioters were "a small minority of thugs and criminals" - not real muslims and not real Bradfordians. Some, indeed, were white, united under a common desire to take on the police.

But at a time when most fingers on all sides seem still to be pointing anywhere but inwards, he also echoes Ouseley's calls for change within Bradford's Pakistani community - fresh leadership, less importing of sub-continent politics, a greater regard for education.

Rod Sawyer, former principal of Bradford College and a prime example of an incomer passionate about the city, believes the problem "is not that things are better or worse - it's that nothing has changed. We've spent 20 years bumping along the bottom, with appalling inner city housing and schools that still turn out three times the national average of kids with absolutely zero qualifications.

"This is a city with an almost tragic lack of vision."

Reaching those who took part in the "murderous" events of a fortnight ago is more difficult than ever, he warns, since "these riots were not political in the old sense. If you decide politics is irrelevant, you do your own thing. And how do you find spokesmen for a completely anarchic situation? They don't exist."

In the vacuum left where mainstream politics is failing, the far right - though still a tiny minority - appears more determined than it has for years to fill the gap. The NF and BNP recruiters have been out on Bradford's white estates and in ethnically mixed city centre clubs. In the Chicago Rock Cafe, Adam, a 28-year-old salesman who readily admits to disliking "Asian lads - they give you abuse", tells how he was approached by "a guy in a black bomber jacket, black trousers, black tie - a right arsehole. He said: 'There's a civil war coming. Would you fight for your country?' We told him to get lost."

Whether the far right makes inroads or not, alarm within the Pakistani community is already real. In Challenge College, a new state secondary school, a delicate 13-year-old girl in a shalwar kameez describes how her uncle in Oldham had his car burned out during last month's race riot. "We were scared the National Front were coming."

Challenge College itself, in a typically Bradfordian paradox, represents both a problem and a ray of hope for the city. It was set up a year ago with the twin aims of high educational standards and a genuine social and ethnic mix alongside schools that are often almost 100% white or black. Its first set of SATs results have been strong, putting it in the top 10% of schools with similar intakes, but head Gareth Dawkins and the governors are frustrated that the catchment area allocated by the council - Manningham and neighbouring Frizinghall - will make the school monocultural. Now, to councillors' fury, it wants to opt out of council control as a state "foundation school", allowing them to attract a cross-section of pupils.

Only high educational achievement will solve Bradford's ingrained problem of segregated schooling, says Dawkins. "In the end, standards overcome the ethnicity issue for parents, if only the LEA is creative in the way it draws the boundaries. Unfortunately, we can't afford to wait for that to happen."

It is also, of course, inaccurate to blame Bradford's ethnic strife for all its problems. Many observe that neither the riots nor the backlash on the city's white estates would have happened if all those on the streets had a job. Despite their segregation, deprived families from both communities have more in common in terms of poor health and housing and lack of prospects than they would care to admit.

"OK, there is an element of the colour of your skin, but it boils down to your social, educational and economic background," says Adeeba Malik, deputy chief executive of Bradford's QED training agency. Still a rarity as a young woman of Pakistani origin in a prominent position, she has a photograph of her parents taken shortly after their emigration from Lahore, her mother with armfuls of bangles, her father proud of his 16-hour-a-day job in the mills. "When the National Front were active in the 70s, they thought about going back," she says, "but Bradford is their home, as it is mine. We have the eyes of the world on us now, and we have to have faith in the city - not just between ourselves, but project it outside. If nothing moves on now, I don't ever see it moving on."